Imagine

Imagine you are a young man growing up in a crime-ridden inner-city. Your father was taken from you at a young age, first from laws that criminalize petty nonviolent behaviors, and then through the violent-perversion of Christian charity that is welfare. By pricing your father—himself a victim of fatherlessness—out of the home, the welfare system financially incentivized the dissolution of your parental protection.

You grow up with a mom overloaded by a violence-based government monopoly on money—the Federal Reserve’s constant money creation quietly and steadily destroys her purchasing power through inflation that discourages saving and increases the costs of goods and services, especially in healthcare, education, and heavily rigged-ulated food. Mom works two jobs and hardly has time to see you.

At 17, you try to get a job but to no avail. Violence-based minimum wage laws price you out of the market as an untrained worker. Regulations make it virtually impossible to start a business without rigged-ulated licenses, bonds, and rules and, besides, violence-based public school doesn’t even teach you how to maximize your skills in a market startup, only to reinforce a cookie cutter ethos reflective of your culture: do as we say because we have the power. If you don’t obey, don’t get caught.

You were told in Church Jesus says to “Take up your cross and follow him.” You heard about how he said “turn the other cheek” and that “those who live by the sword die by the sword.” But since none of society’s social and political order seems to reflect that in a 80% Christian-identifying country, you compartmentalize it as pie-in-the-sky dreams.

You were told America was the land of dreams: culture teaches you to get rich so that others envy you and the rules don’t apply. Eventually, if you’re big enough, you’ll have the power and be able to shape the rules so that others obey you. Politicians teach you to pick an identity tribe with which to protect yourself from other identity tribes and spend your entire political thought life blaming the other tribes for all of life’s problems.

Your neighborhood is plagued by a territorial gang. You notice all the drug sellers have lots of money, attention from girls, and demonstrate the confidence afforded by financial freedom. They give you a hit of their product: it helps you numb out from your anger or boredom. They offer older models that fill the absence of your parents. The money you can make per hour with them—thanks to the violence-based drug prohibition—is astronomical compared to entry level jobs around you. It allows you the financial freedom to do things you could never dream of if you wanted to start a business in a heavily rigged-ulated legal industry. Plus, the dealers are warm, charismatic, and offer protection from other violent people in the area. It’s a no-brainer.

You start selling drugs.

Eventually, you get caught by police—you didn’t kill anyone with your products, but society wants to violently force you to stop your behavior. You take a plea bargain like 70% of your fellow citizens after seeing the massive amount of years you’d lose of your life in a violent cage. While in prison, you are introduced to a more raw distillation of your outside world: pick a tribe, become more violent, become more paranoid, shut down empathy, harden your heart to survive. Society pats itself on the back while governed by the same forces in less apparent form on the outside. Too busy to care.

You eventually get out but have to pay large amounts of money to a predatory criminally unjust system. If you make one wrong move, you’re back in the cage. You are forced to carry an X on your forehead everywhere you apply for a meager job—meanwhile, presidents rule over you who have done drugs and preside over CIA operations with public histories of drug trading. You have armed agents visit you to make you humiliatingly urinate in their presence to detect any trace of substance their federal superiors have trafficked—all in the past, of course.

In your old age, your health is plagued by premature ailment and disease. Violence-based rigged-ulations have created an artificial price disparity between healthy natural foods and processed foods created by government food cartels. You are told every day your lot in life is only to be blamed on ephemeral generic greed of wealthier citizens all around you caused by too much market freedom. You are given rigged-ulated medical care that shepherds you into perusing only patent-based, FDA-cartel-protected medicine. If the 80% of America claiming to be Christian had imitated Jesus, you’d have a much cheaper cost for medicine with a more competitive, informed market of health solutions not reliant on violence-based patents.

What I have described is the scenario taking place for millions upon millions of Americans and parts of it are experiences common to all Americans. 80% of America claims to be imitating Jesus. And yet they appear to be asleep in using Jesus’s social ordering principles to set captives free, heal families, end cyclical violence.